Marishka VS

Friday, 11 January 2013

I apologise for the lack of content on this blog over the past few months.After completing my internship at the Guardian I spent a month in South Africa where I helped make this film about my Dad's farm in Mpumalanga:Since then I have been working as a freelance journalist for publications such as the Guardian producing content such as this film about Roseline Akhalu, a Nigerian kidney transplant patient who is facing deportation to Nigeria:I am now working on a longer documentary version of the Guardian film about Roseline Akhalu with my partner Joe Bream. We will be submitting this documentary into film festivals such as the Sheffield Doc/Fest.I am also developing a new version of my Sheffield Unchained website which will be re-launched in the next few months, along with a new portfolio website about my work and projects.Look out for all this exciting new work coming soon!

He climbed the nine-meter high Fry building
at 11.30am yesterday morning, Tuesday 24 July, and refused to come down even
though temperatures reached around 29°C in Lincolnshire.

The Malaysian said he was protesting at the
injustice in this country and could be heard shouting for water and saying that
he thought he was going to faint. He said the officers refused to bring him
water and he threatened to jump off the roof in frustration at the way they
were treating him. He said in a telephone call from the rooftop:

They're not human, how can they treat me
like this. There is no point anymore.

A UK Border Agency (UKBA) statement
said that they sent trained staff to negotiate with the detainee and that they
convinced him to come down shortly after 5pm yesterday afternoon. The UKBA said
he was placed in a separate unit at Morton Hall where staff could talk to him.

The Malaysian is allegedly only one of a
group of detainees who have threatened to climb the buildings of Morton Hall in
protest at the 'disrespect' and 'inhumane' treatment they claim to be
experiencing.

One of the rooftops of a building inside Morton Hall

The protest began on Monday night, when a
Palestinian detainee climbed onto the roof of the Library building at Morton
Hall at 5pm and refused to come down.

Detainees said they woke up yesterday morning to
find that the Palestinian had disappeared from the roof of the building. A UKBA
spokesperson said that the Palestinian was talked down during the early hours
of Tuesday morning and is safe and well.

The Palestinian, around 25 years old,
climbed on to the roof in protest at being detained for eighteen months. He had
recently been unsuccessful in a bail application and had been on hunger strike
for a couple of days.

An Iraqi Kurdish detainee at Morton Hall,
who helped to translate for the Palestinian, said:

People are generally angry with the UKBA,
they are fed up with the removal policy.

In an interview yesterday, he said that he
couldn't believe how bad the situation was for many of the detainees.

Some people are in a really bad situation
here, they have been here for years, but they are innocent, they haven't done
anything wrong.

The Iraqi Kurd said that there is an atmosphere
of revolt in the detention centre, with many detainees planning to climb to the
roofs of the buildings. He said that around six detainees had been taken to
prison for protesting and that staff had subsequently locked detainees in their
rooms.

Nottingham Indymedia
has reported that many of the detainees are protesting because of the centre's
disrespect of their Muslim faith during Ramadan. They published a statement by
the detainees who say they are on strike:

Sir we are here in detention centre Morton
Hall. We are with fasting in the last four days but management not supply
proper food for it. We demand proper food at the proper time. Today they don't
give food at all and guys are on the roof. We are on strike. Why they don't
treat us as human?

We fully support the detainees inside the
detention prison Morton Hall in their hunger strike and protests. Having to
live under the intolerable conditions they are forced into, often for years on
end, being moved around the country from one detention prison to another, in
many cases having no contact with the outside world, it's no surprise they have
had enough. We will continue to support those detained in any way we can whilst
doing all we can to end the inhumane system that puts them there.

A UKBA spokesperson said:

A one man protest at Morton Hall in which a
detainee scaled the roof of the centre has been resolved. The man is safe and
well.

The identities of the detainees have been
withheld for their protection.

An
Iraqi Kurdish detainee who came to the UK after living as a refugee in Germany
during the first Gulf War, said that the Palestinian was around 25 years old
and that he climbed onto the roof in protest at being detained for eighteen
months.

The Iraqi Kurd said that the
Palestinian had recently been unsuccessful in a bail application and that he
had been on hunger strike for a couple of days. He said that two or three
detainees tried to help each other climb up to the roof, but that the
Palestinian was the only one who managed to climb onto the roof.

He described how there
were a lot of detainees standing outside watching and shouting and that some of
them refused to go back to their rooms. “The detention centre was out of
control for a while, but eventually people started going back to their rooms.”

“People are generally
angry with the UK Border Agency
(UKBA), they are fed up with the removal policy.” The Iraqi Kurd said that the
detention guards asked the Palestinian to come down from the roof but he
threatened to jump off every time they came near.

“He wants to kill
himself now, if anybody comes near he wants to jump. He’s standing on the roof
and he wants to jump soon, if anyone comes near him” The Iraqi Kurd, who has been in
Morton Hall for two months, said he helped to translate for the Palestinian a
couple of times.

He expressed
shock at the things he had seen since being at Morton Hall Immigration centre:

England is a country that says it believes in human
rights, but not in this detention centre. They need help somehow, all the
cases I have seen, some really sad stories, people who are here for no reason,
they haven’t committed any crimes, they are in detention for nothing.

He believes that this
is the beginning of a revolt in the detention centre, “There will be more, I
can see how people are reacting to the situation, there is tension amongst the
groups who have been here for a long time.”

Having lived in the UK
for twelve years, The Iraqi Kurd claims that after he was given temporary leave to
remain, the UKBA delayed granting him indefinite leave to remain for five years
and then detained him.

“They are trying to
deport me to Iraq, even though I spent my childhood growing up as a European.” The Iraqi Kurd fled Iraq with his family during the first Gulf War, when the Kurdish
population suffered an 'ethnic cleansing' campaign by Saddam Hussein's regime.
He arrived in Germany with his family when he was ten years old. He is now
waiting for a response from the European Court of Human Rights, and hopes to be
able to return to Germany.

The Iraqi Kurd believes that
the Palestinian is not the only detainee who will revolt. He said there are ten
or fifteen detainees currently on hunger strike and that one has tried to kill
himself through self harm. “Something is going to happen soon, because there is
no help from outside at all and if we ask for help the guards say it is not
their problem.”

The Palestinian will
stay there all night and he will eventually jump and there are others like him,
there are over one hundred of them who want to do something like this

The identities of the detainees have been
withheld for their protection.

The National Coalition of
Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCDAC), who will host the free event this
Tuesday 24 July at 93 Feet East on
Brick Lane in East London, laments the decision not to bring a charge of
corporate manslaughter on the private security firm and believes that
accountability for the insitutionalised abuse of those seeking sanctuary in the
UK seems further away than ever.

Lisa Matthews of NCDAC said, “This incident is just one of many examples of
the detention and deportation machines being used to silence the voice of
migrants, divide communities and try and make us forget that asylum seekers and
other migrants are individuals with human stories to tell.”

Outside an Immigration Removal Centre

NCDAC will screen two documentaries; Hamedullah: The Road Home and How Long is Indefinite?,
which both claim to highlight injustices of the asylum and immigration systems.
The screenings will be followed by a panel discussion with the directors of
the documentaries, young people from Afghanistan, ex-detainees, Lisa Matthews
of NCDAC and Kate Blagojevic of Detention
Action.

Hamedullah: The Road Home, which won Best Short
Documentary at the London
Independent Film Festival, tells the story of a young Afghan who claims asylum in the UK, and
his struggle to cope after being deported on a 'ghost' charter flight back to
Afghanistan.

UK film director and screenwriter Sue Clayton filmed
Hamedullah and his friends up to the day he was deported. Clayton gave
Hamedullah a small video camera when he was deported, hoping to find out
whether he would survive in Afghanistan.

Hamedullah in Afghanistan

Clayton has made over 20 award-winning films for BBC and
Channel 4, including The
Disappearance of Finbar with Jonathan Rhys Meyers. “A lot of my films are
about people who go on journeys, and what people are looking for in their lives
and how they change. Are they running to something or from something and who do
they become when they go on a journey?

“I thought about these unaccompanied children; who do they
grow up to be, do they feel Afghan, do they feel British? So my real
inspiration wasn’t even the political side at first, it was more about how you
put your identity together every morning, what makes you you, is it your
friends, your music, do you really cling onto your family and your past or do
you have to let that go? So it was a sort of emotional interest in how they
keep themselves going, because a lot of them are very positive, so how do they
face each day with all that difficulty behind them?”

How
Long is Indefinite?, directed and produced by Alexis L Wood, claims to be the
first documentary to expose detention without a time limit being exercised on
thousands of immigrants in Britain every day.

Reconstruction of a detention centre from How Long Is Indefinite?

The
film follows the lives of three people caught in immigration limbo and detained
for almost four years between them. They cannot be removed from the UK, yet
they remain detained in prison at an average cost of £40,150
each, per year to the taxpayer.

Wood,
assistant producer at DocHouse in
London, said she made this documentary because she wanted to represent the main
issues leading to detainees caught in detention limbo.

Aissata, one of the characters in How Long Is Indefinite?

“I
made a film for people to actually see the faces, the families and the lives of
people detained which is so easy to forget when we are given statistics of
people removed, told that they are illegal and without rights. In fact the case
is not so simple and many are never removed from the country but held in
detention indefinitely.

“The
longest case we know about is someone being detained for 8 years. Many are held
for several years wondering each day if they will ever be released or be
removed to a regime in which they fear for their lives. I want my
film to make people empathise with the people in this situation and realise
that it is happening to thousands of people every day.”

Saturday, 14 July 2012

Sheffield journalist married local charity worker two years ago, but must return to apply for spouse's visa in Cameroon where he faces persecution.

An emergency protest has been
held outsideSheffield
Town Hall in support of Bernard Mboueyeu, who fears persecution and jail if he
is deported to Cameroon
first thing tomorrow, Monday 16 July.

Mboueyeu, who is currently being
detained at Pennine House in Manchester, was arrested by theUK Border Agency on Tuesday morning. This
is the second time he has been held, after being released and allowed to return
to Sheffield just six weeks ago.

Mboueyeu fled his homeland ofCameroon in 2007 after he
was allegedly beaten up and tortured by the ruling regime for supporting
opposition groups. The treatment followed his arrest by President Paul Biya's
security forces for taking photographs of students being attacked during
protests in 2006. Biya has been in power since 1982.

Supporters say that the
journalist, who was working for a newspaper in southern Cameroon at the time,
was stripped naked, beaten up and kept in jail for forty days. Mboueyeu's wife
Sharon, who lives in Wincobank, Sheffield, said:

They cut his feet with machetes -
he's still got the scars on his legs.

Bernard and Sharon Mboueyeu

Mboueyeu married charity worker
Sharon in 2010 but the Home Office is insisting that he returns to Cameroon to
apply for a spouse's visa. His supporters say that if he is returned as planned
early tomorrow morning, he could be arrested, face torture, or be locked up
indefinitely.

Bernard and Sharon getting married in 2010

Shaffaq Mohammed, Sheffield's Liberal Democrat Leader, who was at the Town
Hall protest, said:

Mboueyeu has offered to return
voluntarily to Cameroon if the Home Office guarantees his safety but the Home
Office have refused to make that guarantee.

We think Bernard's safety is at
grave risk, if not his life. All because a bureaucrat would like a piece of
paper to be sent from a foreign country.

Cameroon has a horrendous record
of gross human rights violations, including torture and killings, against
dissidents and members of opposition. Political opposition is not tolerated in
Cameroon. Any dissent is suppressed through either violence or abuse of the
legal system to silence critics.

A UK Border Agency spokesperson
said:

Our rules are very clear, when
someone has no right to be in the UK we expect them to leave voluntarily. If
they fail to do so, we will seek to remove them.

Cllr Mohammed said that whilst in
Sheffield, Bernard was making a great contribution to the city.

He volunteered with the Royal Society for the Blind and another
charity called Aspire. Two years ago,
when the devastating floods hit Pakistan, one of the first people outside the
Town Hall was Bernard. He helped to highlight the plight and to raise thousands
of pounds.

Bernard Mboueyeu with his grandchildren

Bernard’s wife Sharon
said:

He’s my husband, he’s
a step-dad, he’s a granddad and its so annoying that they’re quite happy to
take him away from us and not allow him to have a family life.

Thursday, 28 June 2012

Square Hole, a monthly comedy night held at the Red Deer pub in
Sheffield, is a down to earth event, offering laughs, free cake and a welcoming
atmosphere.

Usually held on the second Monday of every month, Square Hole has
recently changed its format to include more acts from professional comedians.

Host Rich Milner, said that two professional acts would now open and
close the evening, with a few new acts sandwiched in between. He said, "I’m trying to
book comedians who are very distinctive, where you’re going to go away and
remember them."

Rich is keen to keep the original ethos of the night:

I hope to
maintain a friendly, relaxed atmosphere where the new acts can experiment a
bit. Hopefully it will still be an enjoyable night where everyone can take
part.

The name Square Hole
comes from the idea of a square peg in a round hole. Rich explained that the
ethos of the event is to have a place where comedians can try something
different and where everyone is welcome, with an emphasis on originality.

Rich Milner handing out his homemade free cake

Square Hole, which started in December
2010, has become a popular night with a regular fan base. The event originated
out of Rich’s frustration with over-priced and badly advertised comedy gigs. He said:

I
wanted to do a night that was good value for money. I also wanted to find acts
that were a bit more original and intelligent and to give people space
to experiment. Whilst the onus is still on being funny.

Rich, 29, has been gigging
as a comedian for one year. He entered into comedy after doing performance poetry
with Words Aloud, a popular spoken word
night which ran in Sheffield between 2006 and 2008. His first comedy gigs were
‘Gong’ shows where the acts get ‘gonged’ off if the audience don’t like them.

Whilst Rich enjoyed this competitive experience, he decided that he wanted to
host gigs that would be enjoyable for the audience but also a pleasant
experience for the acts so that they would want to do it again. “So the
emphasis is on being friendly and fairly relaxed,” said Rich.

Red Deer pub near West street in Sheffield

Friendliness is also
important for the Red Deer pub,
landlord Jake Nickles said:

The team at the Red Deer are all down to earth and
we try to keep the character of the pub alive by sharing our own characters.

Jake took over the Red
Deer in August 2010, which was perfect timing for Rich, “Jake had just taken
over and was trying to breathe life into the place.” The pub now hosts a number
of events including a Tuesday night quiz, Sunday night movie screenings and
live acoustic music every Saturday and Thursday evenings.

About Me

I am a Multimedia Web Journalist, enthusiastic rock climber, lover of nature and all things cultural.
My particular interest is human rights and community issues.
I have developed a local website www.sheffieldunchained.co.uk about independent people, places and organisations in Sheffield.
I have also created a website www.unheardvoices.org.uk: Unheard Voices aims firstly to give a voice to asylum seekers and refugees by telling their stories through film, audio and images. Allowing readers to see them as real people, with real experiences. Unheard Voices aims secondly to take an honest look at the facts, issues and statistics. Allowing readers to make an informed judgement on the issues surrounding asylum in the UK.
I also write for the Guardian, Guardian Northerner and Culture Vulture website amongst other publications.